'The day following Jesus would go forth into Galilee, and findeth
Philip, and saith unto him, Follow Me.'—JOHN i. 43.
'The day following'—we have a diary in this chapter and the next,
extending from the day when John the Baptist gives his official
testimony to Jesus, up till our Lord's first journey to Jerusalem. The
order of events is this. The deputation from the Sanhedrim to John
occupied the first day. On the second Jesus comes back to John after
His temptation, and receives his solemn attestation. On the third day,
John repeats his testimony, and three disciples, probably four, make
the nucleus of the Church. These are the two pairs of brothers, James
and John, Andrew and Peter, who stand first in every catalogue of the
Apostles, and were evidently nearest to Christ.
'The day following' of our text is the fourth day. On it our Lord
determines to return to Galilee. His objects in His visit to John were
accomplished—to receive his public attestation, and to gather the first
little knot of His followers. Thus launched upon His course, He desired
to return to His native district.
These events had occurred where John was baptising, in a place called
in the English version Bethabara, which means 'The house of crossing,'
or as we might say, Ferry-house. The traditional site for John's
baptism is near Jericho, but the next chapter (verse i.) shows that it
was only a day's journey from Cana of Galilee, and must therefore have
been much further north than Jericho. A ford, still bearing the name
Abarah, a few miles south of the lake of Gennesaret, has lately been
discovered. Our Lord, then, and His disciples had a day's walking to
take them back to Galilee. But apparently before they set out on that
morning, Philip and Nathanael were added to the little band. So these
two days saw six disciples gathered round Jesus.
Andrew and John sought Christ and found Him. To them He revealed
Himself as very willing to be approached, and glad to welcome any to
His side. Peter, who comes next, was brought to Christ by his brother,
and to him Christ revealed Himself as reading his heart, and promising
and giving him higher functions and a more noble character.
Now we come to the third case, 'Jesus findeth Philip,' who was not
seeking Jesus, and who was brought by no one. To him Christ reveals
Himself as drawing near to many a heart that has not thought of Him,
and laying a masterful hand of gracious authority on the springs of
life and character in that autocratic word 'Follow Me.' So we have a
gradually heightening revelation of the Master's graciousness to all
souls, to them that seek and to them that seek Him not. It is only to
the working out of these simple thoughts that I ask your attention now.
I. First, then, let us deal with the revelation that is given us here
of the seeking Christ.
Every one who reads this chapter with even the slightest attention must
observe how 'seeking' and 'finding' are repeated over and over again.
Christ turns to Andrew and John with the question, 'What _seek_ ye?'
Andrew, as the narrative says, '_findeth_ his own brother, Simon, and
saith unto him, "We have _found_ the Messias!"' Then again, Jesus
_finds_ Philip; and again, Philip, as soon as he has been won to Jesus,
goes off to _find_ Nathanael; and his glad word to him is, once more,
'We have _found_ the Messias.' It is a reciprocal play of finding and
seeking all through these verses.
There are two kinds of finding. There is a casual stumbling upon a
thing that you were not looking for, and there is a finding as the
result of seeking. It is the latter which is here. Christ did not
casually stumble upon Philip, upon that morning, before they departed
from the fords of the Jordan on their short journey to Cana of Galilee.
He went to look for this other Galilean, one who was connected with
Andrew and Peter, a native of the same little village. He went and
found him; and whilst Philip was all unexpectant and undesirous, the
Master came to him and laid His hand upon him, and drew him to Himself.
Now that is what Christ often does. There are men like the merchantman
who went all over the world seeking goodly pearls, who with some eager
longing to possess light, or truth, or goodness, or rest, search up and
down and find it nowhere, because they are looking for it in a hundred
different places. They are expecting to find a little here and a little
there, and to piece all together to make of the fragments one
all-sufficing restfulness. Then when they are most eager in their
search, or when, perhaps, it has all died down into despair and apathy,
the veil seems to be withdrawn, and they see Him whom they have been
seeking all the time and knew not that He was there beside them. All,
and more than all, that they sought for in the many pearls is stored
for them in the one Pearl of great price. The ancient covenant stands
firm to-day as for ever. 'Seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be
opened unto you.'
But then there are others, like Paul on the road to Damascus or like
Matthew the publican, sitting at the receipt of custom, on whom there
is laid a sudden hand, to whom there comes a sudden conviction, on
whose eyes, not looking to the East, there dawns the light of Christ's
presence. Such cases occur all through the ages, for He is not to be
confined, bless His name! within the narrow limits of answering seeking
souls, or of showing Himself to people that are brought to Him by human
instrumentality; but far beyond these bounds He goes, and many a time
discloses His beauty and His sweetness to hearts that wist not of Him,
and who can only say, 'Lo! God was in this place, and I knew it not.'
'Thou wast found of them that sought Thee not.'
As it was in His miracles upon earth, so it has been in the sweet and
gracious works of His grace ever since. Sometimes He healed in response
to the yearning desire that looked out of sick eyes, or that spoke from
parched lips, and no man that ever came to Him and said 'Heal me!' was
sent away beggared of His blessing. Sometimes He healed in response to
the beseeching of those who, with loving hearts, carried their dear
ones and laid them at His feet. But sometimes, to magnify the
spontaneity and the completeness of His own love, and to show us that
He is bound and limited by no human co-operation, and that He is His
own motive, He reached out the blessing to a hand that was not extended
to grasp it; and by His question, 'Wilt thou be made whole?' kindled
desires that else had lain dormant for ever.
And so in this story before us; He will welcome and over-answer Andrew
and John when they come seeking; He will turn round to them with a
smile on His face, that converts the question, 'What seek ye?' into an
invitation, 'Come and see.' And when Andrew brings his brother to Him,
He will go more than halfway to meet him. But when these are won, there
still remains another way by which He will have disciples brought into
His Kingdom, and that is by Himself going out and laying His hand on
the man and drawing him to His heart by the revelation of His love. But
further, and in a deeper sense, He really seeks us all, and, unasked,
bestows His love upon us.
Whether we seek Him or no, there is no heart upon earth which Christ
does not desire; and no man or woman within the sound of His gospel
whom He is not in a very real sense seeking that He may draw them to
Himself. His own word is a wonderful one: 'The Father _seeketh_ such to
worship Him'; as if God went all up and down the world looking for
hearts to love Him and to turn to Him with reverent thankfulness. And
as the Father, so the Son—who is for us the revelation of the Father:
'The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.' No
one on earth wanted Him, or dreamed of His coming. When He bowed the
heavens and gathered Himself into the narrow space of the manger in
Bethlehem, and took upon Him the limitations and the burdens and the
weaknesses of manhood, it was not in response to any petition, it was
in reply to no seeking; but He came spontaneously, unmoved, obeying but
the impulse of His own heart, and because He would have mercy. He who
is the Beginning, and will be First in all things, was first in this,
that before they called He answered, and came upon earth unbesought and
unexpected, because His own infinite love brought Him hither. Christ's
mercy to a world does not come like water in a well that has to be
pumped up, by our petitions, by our search, but like water in some
fountain, rising sparkling into the sunlight by its own inward impulse.
He is His own motive; and came to a forgetful and careless world, like
a shepherd who goes after his flock in the wilderness, not because they
bleat for him, while they crop the herbage which tempts them ever
further from the fold and remember him and it no more, but because he
cannot have them lost. Men are not conscious of needing Christ till He
comes. The supply creates the demand. He is like the 'dew which
tarrieth not for man, nor waiteth for the sons of men.'
But not only does Christ seek us all, inasmuch as the whole conception
and execution of His great work are independent of man's desires, but
He seeks us each in a thousand ways. He longs to have each of us for
His disciples. He seeks each of us for His disciples, by the motion of
His Spirit on our spirits, by stirring conviction in our consciences,
by pricking us often with a sense of our own evil, by all our
restlessness and dissatisfaction, by the disappointments and the
losses, as by the brightnesses and the goodness of earthly providences,
and often through such agencies as my lips and the lips of other men.
The Master Himself, who seeks all mankind, has sought and is seeking
you at this moment. Oh! yield to His search. The shepherd goes out on
the mountain side, for all the storm and the snow, and wades knee-deep
through the drifts until he finds the sheep. And your Shepherd, who is
also your Brother, has come looking for you, and at this moment is
putting out His hand and laying hold of some of you through my poor
words, and saying to you, as He said to Philip, 'Follow Me!'
II. And now let us next consider that word of authority which, spoken
to the one man in our text, is really spoken to us all.
'Jesus findeth Philip, and saith unto him, "Follow Me!"' No doubt a
great deal more passed, but no doubt what more passed was less
significant and less important for the development of faith in this man
than what is recorded. The word of authority, the invitation which was
a demand, the demand which was an invitation, and the personal
impression which He produced upon Philip's heart, were the things that
bound him to Jesus Christ for ever. 'Follow Me,' spoken at the
beginning of the journey of Christ and His disciples back to Galilee,
might have meant merely, on the surface, 'Come back with us.' But the
words have, of course, a much deeper meaning. They mean—be My disciple.
Think what is implied in them, and ask yourself whether the demand that
Christ makes in these words is an unreasonable one, and then ask
yourselves whether you have yielded to it or not.
We lose the force of the image by much repetition. Sheep follow a
shepherd. Travellers follow a guide. Here is a man upon some dangerous
cornice of the Alps, with a ledge of limestone as broad as the palm of
your hand, and perhaps a couple of feet of snow above that, for him to
walk upon, a precipice on either side; and his guide says, as he ropes
himself to him, 'Now, tread where I tread!' Travellers follow their
guides. Soldiers follow their commanders. There is the hell of the
battlefield; here a line of wavering, timid, raw recruits. Their
commander rushes to the front and throws himself upon the advancing
enemy with the one word, 'Follow' and the coward becomes a hero.
Soldiers follow their captains. Your Shepherd comes to you and calls,
'Follow Me.' Your Captain and Commander comes to you and calls, 'Follow
Me.' In all the dreary wilderness, in all the difficult contingencies
and conjunctions, in all the conflicts of life, this Man strides in
front of us and proposes Himself to us as Guide, Example, Consoler,
Friend, Companion, everything; and gathers up all duty, all
blessedness, in the majestic and simple words, 'Follow Me.'
It is a call at the least to accept Him as a Teacher, but the whole
gist of the context here is to show us that from the beginning Christ's
disciples did not look upon Him as a Rabbi's disciples did, as being
simply a teacher, but recognised Him as the Messias, the Son of God,
the King of Israel. So that they were called upon by this command to
accept His teaching in a very special way, not merely as Hillel or
Gamaliel asked their disciples to accept theirs. Do you do that? Do you
take Him as your illumination about all matters of theoretical truth,
and of practical wisdom? Is His declaration of God your theology? Is
His declaration of His own Person your creed? Do you think about His
Cross as He did when He elected to be remembered in all the world by
the broken body and the shed blood, which were the symbols of His
reconciling death? Is His teaching, that the Son of Man comes to 'give
His life a ransom for many,' the ground of your hope? Do you follow Him
in your belief, and following Him in your belief, do you accept Him as,
by His death and passion, the Saviour of your soul? That is the first
step—to follow Him, to trust Him wholly for what He is, the Incarnate
Son of God, the Sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, and
therefore for your sins and mine. This is a call to faith.
It is also a call to obedience. 'Follow Me' certainly means 'Do as I
bid you,' but softens all the harshness of that command. Sedulously
plant your tremulous feet in His firm footsteps. Where you see His
track going across the bog be not afraid to walk after Him, though it
may seem to lead you into the deepest and the blackest of it. 'Follow
Him' and you will be right. 'Follow Him' and you will be blessed. Do as
Christ did, or as according to the best of your judgment it seems to
you that Christ would have done if He had been in your circumstances;
and you will not go far wrong. 'The Imitation of Christ,' which Thomas
a Kempis wrote his book about, is the sum of all practical
Christianity. 'Follow Me!' makes discipleship to be something more than
intellectual acceptance of His teaching, something more than even
reliance for my salvation upon His work. It makes
discipleship—springing out of these two—the acceptance of His teaching
and the consequent reliance, by faith, upon His word—to be a practical
reproduction of His character and conduct in mine.
It is a call to communion. If a man follows Christ he will walk close
behind Him, and near enough to Him to hear Him speak, and to be 'guided
by His eye.' He will be separated from other people, and from other
paths. In these four things, then—Faith, Obedience, Imitation,
Communion—lies the essence of discipleship. No man is a Christian who
has not in some measure all four. Have you got them?
What right has Jesus Christ to ask me to follow Him? Why should I? Who
is He that He should set Himself up as being the perfect Example and
the Guide for all the world? What has He done to bind me to Him, that I
should take Him for my Master, and yield myself to Him in a subjection
that I refuse to the mightiest names in literature, and thought, and
practical benevolence? Who is this that assumes thus to dominate over
us all? Ah! brethren, there is only one answer. 'This is none other
than the Son of God who has given Himself a ransom for me, and
therefore has the right, and only therefore has the right, to say to
me, "Follow Me."'
III. And now one last word. Think for a moment about this silently and
swiftly obedient disciple.
Philip says nothing. Of course the narrative is mere sketchy outline.
He is silent, but he yields. Ah, brethren, how quickly a soul may be
won or lost! That moment, when Philip's decision was trembling in the
balance, was but a moment. It might have gone the other way, for Christ
has no pressed men in His army; they are all volunteers. It might have
gone the other way. A moment may settle for you whether you will be His
disciple or not. People tell us that the belief in instantaneous
conversions is unphilosophical. It seems to me that the objections to
them are unphilosophical. All decisions are matters of an instant.
Hesitation may be long, weighing and balancing may be a protracted
process, but the decision is always a moment's work, a knife-edge. And
there is no reason whatever why any one listening to me may not now, if
he or she will, do as this man Philip did on the spot, and when Christ
says 'Follow Me,' turn to Him and answer, 'I will follow Thee
whithersoever Thou goest.'
There is an old church tradition which says that the disciple who at a
subsequent period answered Christ, 'Lord! suffer me first to go and
bury my father,' was this same Apostle. I do not think that at all
likely, but the tradition suggests to us one last thought about the
reasons why people are kept back from yielding this obedience to
Christ's invitation. Many of you are kept back, as that procrastinating
follower was, because there are some other duties which you feel, or
make to be, more important. 'I will think about Christianity and
turning religious when this, that, or the other thing has been got
over. I have my position in life to make. I have a great many things to
do that must be done at once, and really, I have not time to think
about it.'
Then there are some of you that are kept from following Christ because
you have never yet found out that you need a guide at all. Then there
are some of you that are kept back because you like very much better to
go your own way, and to follow your own inclination, and dislike the
idea of following the will of another. There are a host of other
reasons that I do not need to deal with now; but oh! brethren, none of
them is worth pleading. They are excuses, they are not reasons. 'They
all with one consent began to make excuse'—excuses, not reasons; and
manufactured excuses, in order to cover a decision which has been taken
before, and on other grounds altogether, which it is not convenient to
bring up to the surface. I am not going to deal with these in detail,
but I beseech you, do not let what I venture to call Christ's seeking
of you once more, even by my poor words now, be in vain.
Follow Him. Trust, obey, imitate, hold fellowship with Him. You will
always have a Companion, you will always have a Protector. 'He that
followeth Me,' saith He, 'shall not walk in darkness, but shall have
the light of life.' And if you will listen to the Shepherd's voice and
follow Him, that sweet old promise will be true, in its divinest and
sweetest sense, about your life, in time; and about your life in the
moment of death, the isthmus between two worlds, and about your life in
eternity—'They shall not hunger nor thirst, neither shall the sun nor
heat smite them; for He that hath mercy on them shall lead them, even
by the springs of water shall He guide them.' 'Follow thou Me.'